Youtube Research

YouTube Research

Use this skill for public YouTube channel summaries, audience comment samples, downloadable video records, and public video metrics through PostPlus.

Apply shared rulebook and user-guidance rules from postplus-shared. When a supported command completes but evidence is empty, sparse, noisy, off-topic, or the wrong record type, apply the postplus-shared reference research-quality-recovery.md; hard execution errors still fail fast.

Before Collection Boundary

The released collection does not expose subscriber identities. Use channel metadata and comments as public proxies, and do not present comment authors as the subscriber base.

Research Routes

Use youtube-videos for public video records, youtube-channel-summary for channel facts, youtube-comments for audience language, and youtube-video-download only when downloadable records are explicitly needed. PostPlus handles execution details.

postplus research run youtube-videos \
  --url "https://example.com/source" \
  --wait \
  --output ./result.json

postplus research run youtube-channel-summary \
  --channel "@example" \
  --wait \
  --output ./result.json

Default Workflow

1. For channel research, collect a channel summary.
2. For audience research, collect a small comments sample.
3. For broad public video discovery, compile a small public-video plan and run the youtube-videos route.
4. If a run is pending, preserve its result file and resume with postplus research run --resume-from <result.json>.
5. Keep observation separate from inference, especially for audience claims.

Result record shapes for every research route are documented in the postplus-shared reference dataset-item-schemas.md; consult it before writing result-processing code, and probe a single record only to verify.

While a run is pending, tell the user the research is continuing from a saved checkpoint and continue independent brief or source-review work.

Output

Return channel metadata, public video records, comment-sample findings, source URLs, metric fields that were present, and clear notes about unavailable subscriber identities.

Failure Modes

• Stop if the request includes non-YouTube platforms.
• Stop if no public YouTube URL, channel, or query can be used.
• Stop if PostPlus cannot resolve the channel handle or URL.
• Stop on PostPlus service, auth, DNS, proxy, network, or malformed-output hard errors.
• Do not promise private audience identities or logged-in analytics.

Handoff

Benchmark findings can feed benchmark-to-brief, video-analysis, or broader cross-platform synthesis.

Public Command Boundary

• Choose the smallest matching command or workflow from the user input and run it directly.
• Readiness diagnostics: postplus doctor --skill youtube-research.
• If an owned CLI or script command fails, report the exact error and stop. Do not bypass the failure with metadata-only answers, readiness probing, local payload rewrites, alternate services, or unpublished tools.
• Inspect a route with postplus research run <route> --help only when needed.
• Run postplus research run <route> --<url/channel flags> --limit <n> --wait --output <result.json>.
• Use only the semantic flags shown by the selected route.
• Keep the first pass bounded; expand only after inspecting the first result.
• If the CLI returns a quote-confirmation challenge, run postplus quote confirm --json --challenge-file <challenge.json> and retry with the returned token.